


in the golden twilight

by ephemeralblossom



Category: Black Panther (2018), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-21 17:50:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13746165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ephemeralblossom/pseuds/ephemeralblossom
Summary: T’Challa has faced many difficult choices in his life, and yet it seems to him that none have been quite as wrenching as letting N'Jadaka die.





	in the golden twilight

T’Challa has faced many difficult choices in his life, and yet it seems to him that none have been quite as wrenching as letting N'Jadaka die.

He could carry N'Jadaka to Shuri’s lab and beg Shuri to heal him. Order, if he had to – though he thinks that for love of him Shuri would heal even the man who had come within a moment of being her murderer. Perhaps N’Jadaka’s injury would be beyond even Shuri’s aid, but T’Challa knows the strength of the heart-shaped herb that has transformed their bodies. Given a chance, it would revive him. 

T’Challa watches the sun set over the mountains, and does not give the heart-shaped herb a chance.

There is no place for N’Jadaka in Wakanda. There should have been, when he was a boy, a prince of the blood, not yet abandoned. T’Challa imagines them running across the hillsides as youths, matching their strengths in friendly sparring contests, laughing and teasing each other in fond competition. He pictures a world in which N’Jadaka is at his right hand – or perhaps he is at N’Jadaka’s, for in that world perhaps N’Jadaka would have been the most worthy to be King. 

He looks at his cousin’s face, the simmering anger now smoothed into peace, and his heart weeps within him.

 _Bury me in the ocean_ , N’Jadaka said, and yet there is no ocean, not in Wakanda. 

T’Challa is tired, bone-tired, and his shoulders are heavy with grief. It has been too much, his father and Zuri gone, his people turned against each other, and now N’Jadaka dead at his hand. There are choices to be made in the coming days, choices which he already feels half-shaped within him; for all that N’Jadaka forced his will with fire and destruction, and would have burned the world down around him, T’Challa still felt the weight of some of his arguments. The world is changing, and perhaps it is time for Wakanda to change with it. Has not Nakia fought for the outside world for years? It is she who will be T’Challa’s guide, if he turns at last from the long centuries of tradition and strikes a new trail.

Yet even if Wakanda joins the world, it will not be as N’Jadaka has wished. There will be no Wakandan Empire erected on the corpses of the colonizers, with the oppressed becoming the oppressors, vibranium weapons in their hands and bones crushed beneath their feet. T’Challa will give aid and technology to the world. He will build bridges and tear down barriers. He will bring hope, not fear.

He thinks N’Jadaka would call him weak.

 _Oh my brother_. 

If T’Challa was only a good man, he would try to save N’Jadaka. He would carry him in his arms to Shuri, be waiting at his bedside when he woke. He would withstand N’Jadaka’s rage, would do everything in his power to help him towards a recovery beyond the physical. Somewhere inside N’Jadaka is a wounded child screaming at the dark, creating an armored shell of fury to protect itself, broken and in pain. In time, the wound might begin to heal. 

But T’Challa can not only be a good man. He must strive to be a good king.

He has seen what N’Jadaka’s pain and rage has done to Wakanda, and what it might have done to the world. He cannot guarantee that the wound would heal, or that he would be able to contain N’Jadaka if he again tried to bring destruction upon the world. However deep his personal grief, T’Challa cannot risk the safety of his people. N’Jadaka is one of the most capable, determined, and ruthless men T’Challa has ever met. To let him walk free in Wakanda would be criminally negligent. 

Yet for such a man, imprisonment would be intolerable. If N’Jadaka’s soul did not heal, if he did not come to believe in Nakia’s vision for a Wakanda that engaged with the world, rather than his own, that imprisonment must be indefinite. And however kind his captors, however light the bars around him, he would never be free. T’Challa can see how N’Jadaka would find death to be superior to helplessness, to pity, to a cage. 

In the end, however much he may grieve, he must respect N’Jadaka’s choice.

“May you find peace,” T’Challa says aloud, hearing the rawness in his own voice. 

The moments have slipped by, slow but sure. He thinks it is too late now even for Shuri, and he closes his eyes against the hot rush of tears.

He grieves for what might have been, and for what was. He grieves for the fatherless boy abandoned by his kindred, and for the tormented man that boy grew up to be. He grieves for the dead N’Jadaka left in his turbulent wake, and for the dead of Wakanda slain today. He grieves for the man who dreamed of a better world, but could only envision it built drenched in blood. 

There is no ocean to bury N’Jadaka in, not in Wakanda, but they will bury him with all honor. For however brief a time, for however violent his rule, he was their king. He will have the burial his father was denied, and the Wakanda that never knew him will remember him. 

And someday, when T’Challa goes to join his father at last, he will see his cousin again, standing among the Black Panthers of the ancestral plane. 

He hopes when that time comes, his cousin will walk to meet him. He hopes N’Jadaka’s burdens will have fallen away, and the wound in his heart healed. He hopes his nascent vision for a new course for Wakanda will have borne fruit, and that he will not leave his successor any hidden falsehoods or heartbreaking choices such as those his father left him. He hopes.

T’Challa weeps in the golden twilight, but he is dry-eyed when he cradles N’Jadaka’s body in his arms and carries it inside, out of the darkness.

***


End file.
